cover image The de-Voicing of Society: Why We Don't Talk to One Another

The de-Voicing of Society: Why We Don't Talk to One Another

John L. Locke. Simon & Schuster, $25 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-684-84333-9

While cellular phones, e-mail and Internet services proliferate, opportunities for face-to-face contact and intimate conversation are shrinking, leaving an increasingly atomized society of insulated, TV-watching individualists, laments neurolinguist Locke in this disturbing, if not exactly surprising, report. A former Harvard Medical School lecturer who teaches human communications sciences at the Univ. of Sheffield, England, Locke traces the decline of social talk to a general withdrawal from community life, the proliferation of isolating technologies and amusements and a loss of places where people can assemble. Echoing points made by Robin Dunbar's Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, he argues that talking fulfills a biological need for species and group connection deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. This leads him to draw not always convincing parallels among human interactions, monkeys' alarm calls and our hominid ancestors' sound making. His witty analysis of the varieties of communication--gossip, self-disclosure, small talk, networking, bonding talk--reveals that talking is often not so much factually informative or intellectually complex as personal, intimate and emotional. But today, he warns, ""the exchange of information is too often the reason for speech, the personal relationship relegated to a position of secondary importance."" The solution? Locke suggests joining groups, curtailing time with the TV and computer monitor and opting for interpersonal activities over time-consuming jobs--possibilities that have already been much talked about. (Sept.)